I mean good for them, but at that price and them specs that’s an insanely expensive thing.
seeing as how it’s directed at enthusiasts i.e. people who’ll fiddle with their phone, I contend that those people are equally likely to pick up an used ex-flagship of some years, flash lineageOS and have at least an equal device at like a tenth of the price.
the repairability - cool, it’s better if it’s there than not. but, I stress for the intended audience, swapping out batteries and cameras and stuff is perfectly achievable on normal phones. and even if it isn’t, $50 gets me an immensely powerful SDM8xx device, so dicking around with replacing parts at that price point is more of a hobby than necessity.
this thing with those specs should cost like $200. engineering efforts should be spent at identifying soon-to-be abandoned models from existing manufacturers and taking over production, not on designing bespoke parts and fucking lanyard covers and whatnot.
If you remember the early Fairphone models they were truly underspecced, so this is reasonable by comparison. And with respect to LineageOS, my experience is that only popular phones get long term support and it’s a bit of a crapshoot. And this is only going to get worse as more and more manufacturers disable bootloader unlocking, or make it incredibly obnoxious to do so (see Xiaomi).
Getting a phone that isn’t a Pixel and is going to have long term support (including non-Android variants) is the main motivation here as I see it. And I’d personally be willing to have slightly weaker specs for that, although the price outside of Europe will push it away from “worth it” I suspect.
I mean good for them, but at that price and them specs that’s an insanely expensive thing.
seeing as how it’s directed at enthusiasts i.e. people who’ll fiddle with their phone, I contend that those people are equally likely to pick up an used ex-flagship of some years, flash lineageOS and have at least an equal device at like a tenth of the price.
the repairability - cool, it’s better if it’s there than not. but, I stress for the intended audience, swapping out batteries and cameras and stuff is perfectly achievable on normal phones. and even if it isn’t, $50 gets me an immensely powerful SDM8xx device, so dicking around with replacing parts at that price point is more of a hobby than necessity.
this thing with those specs should cost like $200. engineering efforts should be spent at identifying soon-to-be abandoned models from existing manufacturers and taking over production, not on designing bespoke parts and fucking lanyard covers and whatnot.
If you remember the early Fairphone models they were truly underspecced, so this is reasonable by comparison. And with respect to LineageOS, my experience is that only popular phones get long term support and it’s a bit of a crapshoot. And this is only going to get worse as more and more manufacturers disable bootloader unlocking, or make it incredibly obnoxious to do so (see Xiaomi).
Getting a phone that isn’t a Pixel and is going to have long term support (including non-Android variants) is the main motivation here as I see it. And I’d personally be willing to have slightly weaker specs for that, although the price outside of Europe will push it away from “worth it” I suspect.